I've been a Final Cut user since 2000. I've written three "Final Cut Pro for Dummies" books (plus one about Final Cut Express). I've written fairly glowing reviews of multiple versions of Final Cut for multiple Mac magazines. But since 2010, I've been contemplating my escape from Planet Final Cut...

Yes, this was before the Apple Final Cut Pro X debacle/disaster/catastrophe/suicide attempt. This was before Apple, in the wake of FCPX, arrogantly pulled Final Cut Studio 3 off the market, preventing long-time customers from buying additional seats. It was before Apple abruptly killed off Final Cut Server (without any public comment), wiping out massive amounts of money and time that trusting customers had thrown into it.

Yes, well before all of Apple's recent shenanigans, I started to sense that Final Cut, along with all of Apple's professional apps and gear, was slowly being strangled to death. Here are a few of the harbingers of doom that caught my eye over recent years:

Apple took nearly 2.5 years to upgrade Final Cut Studio from version 2 to 3 (and v.3 was only a moderate upgrade at that). Until then, updates had come at a much more aggressive pace.

Apple cancelled the popular Shake, promising to replace it with a new tool that never came.

Apple got lazy with its Logic Pro app as well, letting development creep along with an upgrade about every two years.

Apple stopped updating the Pro page on its web site long ago. There hasn't been a new item posted in almost two years: http://www.apple.com/pro/

Apple took more than a year to fix a glaring Final Cut 7 bug that made its Close Gap command unreliable. To break a core Timeline feature like Close Gap and not fix it for 14 months was offensive and inexcusable.

Apple cancelled its Xserve RAID then its Xserve hardware.

Apple started taking longer and longer to release Mac Pro workstations, and absolutely phoned in the latest upgrade last July. 511 days in the making, the newest Mac Pro was one of the most un-inspired hardware upgrades I've ever seen from Apple.

Multiple rumors that Apple was trying to sell off its Pro Apps division.

Take just a few of these and maybe they don't add up to anything. But take all of them together, and it's a real sign of Apple's low-to-non-existent priority for professional media. Yes, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while, and by 2010, I reluctantly began to read it. Late last year, I started to look at the two clear alternatives to Final Cut....

Why Premiere and CS5.5?

Avid Media Composer was an obvious choice, and I knew that Avid had really gotten its act together over the last couple of years, with a series of rapid-fire upgrades and compelling price drops. I'd also had some direct contact with various Avid employees and saw that they were very serious about listening to their customers, and communicating with them. As any Final Cut user knows, customer communication is wayyyyy down on Apple's list.

But most of my projects involve editing short-form documentaries that play online, and that are heavy in still pictures (edited in Photoshop) and motion graphics (created in After Effects). Those unique characteristics made me take a look at Adobe Premiere Pro.

Like Avid, I knew that Adobe had been very busy over the last few years. For instance, in the time that Apple released only one upgrade to Final Cut (going from Final Cut Studio v2 to v3), Adobe released FOUR appreciable upgrades to Premiere (CS3, CS4, CS5 & CS5.5). And in between those releases, Adobe also issued smaller "point-something" updates which fixed bugs but also added functionality (support for RedCode, for AVC-Intra, OMF export. etc.)

Finally, taking a look at Premiere's latest feature set impressed me. Some highlights:

Like Final Cut, Premiere's editing is designed to happen on its Timeline, and its tools seem very similar to Final Cut's.

Premiere's "Mercury Playback Engine" can mix different formats without rendering, and can play a few of layers of native footage and/or effects in real-time without extra hardware acceleration (at least on a fast computer like a Mac Pro). But if you install certain Nvidia graphics cards in your Mac, like the new Nvidia Quadro 4000, you can boost the Mercury Engine's performance by many layers and/or effects.

Premiere Pro has a lot of the features that are currently AWOL from Final Cut Pro X. There's multi-camera editing, support for capture/output cards from AJA and Blackmagic, support for XML, AAF import/export, OMF export, etc.

Many editors and producers (like me) already buy Adobe's Creative Suite for Photoshop and After Effects, so trying out Premiere is a free bonus. And the Creative Suite also includes apps for audio editing and mixing (Audition), DVD/BlueRay authoring (Encore), batch encoding video into multiple formats (Adobe Media Encoder), and an interesting script development and breakdown app called Adobe Story that works with Premiere to help organize your footage in post.

Tight integration with other Adobe apps like PhotoShop and After Effects, letting you make changes to files using those apps, and seeing the results automatically appear in Premiere. This was a major benefit for me.

I'm not a big user of third-party plug-ins, but I noticed that the ones I do use (pretty much all from Red Giant such as Colorista and a smattering of Magic Bullet) work with Premiere.

A Real-World Project with Premiere

My next step was to actually try Premiere out on a real-world project I had coming up. It was a 6-minute documentary for a well-known college in California, profiling a famous faculty member. It would involve interview footage shot from two P2 cameras, along with lots of vintage photos cut up in Photoshop, and animated in 3D space via After Effects.

I installed a beta copy of Premiere Pro CS 5.5 on my 2009 Mac Pro (replaced with a final version mid-project), and got to work, making notes of any problems I ran into, along with similarities/differences with Final Cut.

The sections that follow below contain all those impressions, but for those in a hurry, I can sum up my overall experience right now: it was remarkably easy. Within a couple of days, I was working in Premiere almost as smoothly as I would work in Final Cut. Many of Final Cut's Timeline tools have direct equivalents in Premiere, and the whole "philosophy" of editing is very similar between the two apps.

In many ways, I was impressed with how much further ahead Premiere was compared to Final Cut 7 (importing native footage, the Mercury Engine's high performance, and tight integration with other must-have tools). On a couple of occasions I was disappointed to find that Premiere was no more advanced than Final Cut (old-school media organization and so-so recognition of metadata baked into my camera's footage). But there was only one area where I found Premiere to be slightly behind Final Cut, and that was some editing flexibility on the Timeline). Overall, Premiere came out ahead for the kind of work I do.

One more thing: as I dove into Premiere, I had no help. No guidance from Adobe, no third-party book, no tutorials, no manual, and I only occasionally needed to reference Premiere's help files. It's a good sign that a Final Cut user can get up to speed with so little support.

So here are some of my impressions....

Overall Layout

Premiere's overall layout is very Final Cut-esque. It has a Project panel that holds all of your imported media (like Final Cut's Browser), a Source panel for working with individual clips (aka Final Cut's Viewer), a Program panel (aka the Canvas), and a Timeline. It also has many other panels for effects, metadata, etc, that you can call up, move around, organize with tabs, and save in custom layouts called Workspaces.

Overall, Premiere's interface feels just a tad more cluttered than Final Cut's. It feels like there are a few more tabbed windows, and a few more buttons throughout. I'd prefer something a tad cleaner, but got used to things very quickly.

Shortcuts For Final Cut

Adobe makes it easier for Final Cut users to try out Premiere, thanks to the inclusion of a template of keyboard shortcuts inspired by Final Cut (there's also an Avid template too). Just choose Keyboard Shortcuts.... under the Premiere Pro menu and make the switch. Once you do, you'll find many of your favorite Final Cut shortcuts activated -- for instance, Command-J for speed settings, Command-U to make a subclip, and plenty more. I found this helpful to an extent, but not as much as you'd expect, since some of Premiere's tools work fundamentally differently than Final Cut's. For instance, Final Cut lets you repeatedly hit a single key - such as B for Razor Blade or T for Track Select- to toggle through many related tools. Premiere's tools don't toggle like that, so you might press T to select an entire track, but as soon as you try TT for Select All Tracks, you get nothing. In the end, after a day or two, I just decided to start memorizing Premiere's native shortcuts--things like V for the selection tool, N for Rolling edit, and C for the razor. But Premiere does let you customize individual shortcuts as well -- not just choose an entire template -- so I still switched several commands over to what I knew in Final Cut.

You can make Premiere mimic Final Cut's keyboard shortcuts. It's helpful, but tends to break down when you try to use editing tools on the Timeline.

Importing & Organizing Media

I shot my interview on a Panasonic P2 Varicam using the AVC-Intra 100 codec, and on an HVX200 using DVCPRO HD. To import file-based footage, I learned NOT to choose Import... from Premiere's File menu. You can import footage that way, but you have to use a standard OS X file selector box to choose file names without seeing the video they represent. Also, if you import file-based footage this way, Premiere won't reassemble smaller spanned clips into the bigger master clips that the cameraman recorded. So the better option is to use Adobe's Media Browser (under the Window menu), which lets you navigate to a media folder on your drive, see thumbnails for file-based clips and preview them before importing. This is similar to Final Cut's Log and Transfer window, but without the ability to set In and Out points or add logging information. Most people don't use these Log and Transfer features, though, so who cares. And it's very nice not to transcode media into ProRes.

The Media Browser shows you thumbnails of tapeless media before you import it.

I couldn't find a way to specify a logging bin for footage I was importing via the Media Browser. It would just import onto the top level of the Project panel.

You can create subclips and conventional bins, but I was a little disappointed that there was nothing more modern or out-of-the-box to Premiere's file management. For instance, I've used Smart Folders for years in the Mac's Finder and Mail apps, and would have loved to see something like a Smart Folder in Premiere. Final Cut 7 is of course guilty of the same barebones tools, but I was hoping to see a little more progress from Premiere....

As I said, my project involved auditioning and editing tons of still pictures. For still-picture editing, one of the things I absolutely hated about Final Cut was the tiny size of the largest thumbnail view in its Browser. It was just too small to see pictures without having to double-click them and open them in the Viewer. Well, the bad news is that Premiere's biggest thumbnail size is not appreciably bigger than Final Cut's and not big enough for me to scan through a ton of pictures quickly. But here's the good news: the Creative Suite comes with a media preview and organization app called Adobe Bridge, which lets you quickly scroll through huge thumbnails of your media. You can also import images from Bridge to Premiere by dragging the images from Bridge to Premiere's OS X dock icon. So I was able to use Adobe Bridge as a my Project window/Browser when scanning for pictures.

Premiere's Project panel is a spitting image of Final Cut's, except it's organized on a tile system, so items can't hide each other.

There's a dynamic Search field in the Project window that shows corresponding clip names as soon as you start typing things in. Hit Return on your keyboard to see only the Project items (clips, sequences, etc.) using your search criteria. That's a little quick erand easier than Final Cut's clunky Find... function.

Metadata Handling

Adobe has gotten religion about metadata, and lets you add dozens of metadata text to your imported media. Premiere can also read metadata coming from other Adobe apps like Photoshop or After Effects, and those apps can read metadata saved in Premiere--for instance, you can use Adobe Bridge to find clips and other media based on their metadata contents. This is a nice improvement over Final Cut 7, which has virtually no inter-application metadata support (unless you're also using the now-cancelled Final Cut Server).

The metadata panel here shows just a small sample of custom text data you can assign to media.

As for recognizing metadata that's already baked into camera footage (something that many cameras do these days), Premiere is better than Final Cut 7, but still not perfect. My project dealt mostly with P2 metadata, and Premiere was able to read some but not all of the custom metadata text I baked in. It read custom clip names, the Creator field (ie, "K2 Films"), and the Shot Location field ("Los Olivos, CA"), but not other fields like Program Name, Shooter, and Text Memo. As for other cameras, I don't know which of their metadata fields Premiere supports, but my hunch is that it probably skips some useful stuff. Hopefully, Adobe won't take long before supporting all the metadata of major cameras, especially when some of those let you wirelessly upload metadata in the field, using a laptop, iPhone, iPad, or other smartphone. If a producer/director/script supervisor can enter file names and mark good takes and interesting moments right there, on the set, then metadata will become far more useful.

Final Cut has more specialized Timeline tools to accomplish certain editing tasks. You can do the same tasks in Premiere, but instead of selecting a specialized tool, you work with a slightly more general tool, but use modifier keys such as Command or Shift to change the tool's behavior. For instance, if you want to use the razor blade to cut through all tracks in Final Cut, you select the Razor Blade All tool. In Premiere, you select the Razor Tool (which normally only affects one track), and then hold the Shift key down to cut through all tracks. Same thing goes for Premiere's Track Select tool: normally the tool affects just one track, but you can hold Shift to select all tracks. These modifiers let you work quickly once you're used to them, but they can steepen the learning curve a bit.

Premiere has fewer Timeline tools than Final Cut, but you get the same functionality by using modifier keys.

One Final Cut editing feature that didn't have a Premiere equivalent was Final Cut's Close Gap command, which closed a gap on the Timeline if the playhead was positioned in the gap. I missed that! From what I could tell, the closest you get in Premiere is to click a gap to select it, and then hit the Backspace or Delete key.

I missed another small Timeline editing feature from Final Cut: the ability to select a clip(s) on the Timeline, hold the Option key, and make a duplicate of the clip by dragging it elsewhere. I used that feature a lot to build alternate edits on Final Cut's Timeline, seeing which clips I preferred. In Premiere, you have to copy and paste clips to make duplicates, which isn't as convenient as Final Cut's click-and-drag approach, especially if you're trying to place duplicate on another track.

Premiere has a Paste Attributes command, but as far as I could figure out, it wasn't as flexible as Final Cut's in that you have to paste ALL of a copied clip's attributes to other clips, instead of selecting which of the attributes to paste (filters or basic motion or crop, etc.). Strangely, Premiere does have a Remove Effects feature that lets you decide what kind of effects/attributes to remove from selected clips.

Like Final Cut, Premiere can create nested sequences, but it also has a unique Group Command, where you can group clips together so they only move as one.

One nice touch is that you can do Ripple edits on the Timeline without switching from the Selection tool to the Ripple tool. With the Selection tool arrow active, just hold down the Command key to do a ripple edit.

Premiere CS 5.5 now lets you add clips to the Timeline by dragging them from the Project panel (ie, Browser) to the Program panel (ie, Canvas). A little pop-up box appears in the Program panel telling you to drop the clip for an overwrite edit, or drop it while holding Command for an insert edit. It's a small bit of familiar Final Cut functionality in a foreign land....

Integration with Other Adobe Apps

I auditioned a lot of photos on Premiere's timeline before bringing them into After Effects to animate, and this is where Premiere's Dynamic Linking with After Effects really paid off. The first dividend came immediately, in that I could select a bunch of clips on Premiere's Timeline (pictures and video, though I usually worked with pictures), then right-click the selection and choose Replace With After Effects Composition from Premiere's pop-up menu. Viola: Premiere would automatically send the clips to After Effects, and place them in a new comp with the same resolution and framerate of my Premiere timeline, and trim and position each clip in that comp exactly as I had edited it in Premiere. Finally, that new comp would appear on my Premiere timeline where the individual clips had been, and any changes I made to the comp in After Effects would automatically reflect on Premiere's timeline. It was fantastic having an After Effects comp embedded in Premiere, letting me make changes in After Effects, and then jump back to Premiere to see how those changes fit in with the rest of my video. If I had tried to do this effects-heavy work with After Effects and Final Cut, I think it would have taken me an extra 2-3 days of re-rendering and importing effects.

Sometimes I created comps directly in After Effects, and needed to import them into Premiere, creating the same kind of dynamic link. It was as easy as dragging the comp in After Effects, then using the Mac's Command-Tab switcher to jump to Premiere, and then dropping the comp into my Project window.

When I imported a Photoshop file and edited it on Premiere's Timeline, any changes I later made to the file would also automatically reflect on the Timeline (Final Cut can automatically update SOME changes made to imported Photoshop files, but not new layers and bigger changes). This was great for laying photos down quickly to establish my edit and show my client. Weeks later, I went back to Photoshop and did color correction, removed scratches, and extended some backgrounds. Having to re-import all of these revised files into Final Cut would have been a pain....

Exporting Video

As I worked, I regularly uploaded small samples of my video to an FTP server for client review. In my Final Cut days, that meant using Compressor to create a 720x405 pixel video using the H.264 codec, which Compressor automatically uploaded to my server. Fortunately, doing all that was just as easy with Premiere. Premiere ships with a copy of the Adobe Media Encoder, which is a batch-encoder that offers many of the same pre-sets that Compressor does (H.264, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, YouTube) and some it doesn't (Flash, Bluray, Vimeo). And like Compressor, the Media Encoder can render away while you work in Premiere. But usually, I didn't get that far. All of the Media Encoder's presets (and your custom ones) are available directly in Premiere, so I just encoded media by choosing Export Movie... from under the File menu. The drawback of exporting video directly from Premiere instead of Media Encoder is that you can't do any editing until the export is done.

When I exported video from Premiere or from the Adobe Media Encoder, both apps sped things up considerably by using all the cores of my 8-core Mac Pro. That was very nice, after years of watching Compressor ignore most of my Mac's horsepower.

When you export video directly from Premiere or use Media Encoder, you can embed the exported videos with a ton of metadata -- keywords, actors, crew, subject lines, network names...the list goes on and on. You can bake the metadata into your encode, or save it as a separate file that links to the movie. Then you can use Adobe Bridge to do quick metadata searches, making for a cheap, fast, and easy footage database. Again, Compressor can't touch that.

The one hitch with the QuickTime files that Premiere/Media Encoder exported is that they didn't support progressive downloading. Progressive downloading lets a movie start playing as soon as you've downloaded enough of the movie to play it non-stop from start to finish. So if a client clicks a link to watch a 6 minute, 60 megabyte movie, they may only have to wait a few seconds before the movie starts to play in their browser. On the other hand, a movie that does not support progressive downloading will have to load all 60 megabytes before it can start. Anyway, the QuickTime movies Compressor creates are ready for Progressive downloads, but not the ones I was able to create in Adobe's apps.

Misc

Premiere has a History panel that visually shows each operation you've done, letting you backtrack through your work without having to hit Undo several times.

Premiere can open only one project at a time. On the plus side, you can copy/paste clips and sequences between projects -- you just have to close one project, and then open the new one.

This was a bit strange: scrolling my mouse's scroll wheel up and down moved Premiere's Timeline forward and backward in time, instead of scrolling up and down through its tracks. That became a bit annoying as my project grew and I was dealing with a dozen or so tracks and wanted to quickly jump among them. I'd have to do it the old fashioned way by clicking and dragging the Timeline's vertical scroll bar.

I was able to consolidate my project to a much smaller size, with handles for media.

I did encounter a couple of crashes during my 5 week project, but no more than I seemed to get when using Final Cut. In each case, thanks to aggressive auto-saves, I was always able to recover quickly.

Overall

I've completed one project with Premiere and now I'm starting another with it. But I can't truly judge a massive application on a couple short projects. It will probably take me months to really get to know Premiere and see what little annoyances crop up and become more glaring with repetition. I'm also going to give Avid Media Composer a spin on a similar project in the next couple of months, and want to try out Final Cut Pro X as well.

But I can definitely say that First Contact with Premiere was impressive and compelling. And beyond the application itself, I have a lot more confidence in Adobe's ability to deliver professional solutions than I do Apple's. It's really very simple: If Apple's Pro apps went away tomorrow, Apple would barely feel it on its bottom line or stock price. If Adobe's Pro apps went away, so would Adobe. Pro apps is all Adobe thinks about, and after 4+ years of neglect at Apple's hands, that kind of singular focus sounds pretty compelling.

About Helmut Kobler
Helmut Kobler is a Los Angeles-based documentary cameraman and producer. He's also written three editions of Final Cut Pro for Dummies. For more info, go to http://www.losangelescameraman.com.

Still pretty much a personal preference. I'm always a little baffled by the camp that does a lot of work in After Effects but continues to work in FCP, so there is that (Premiere and AE are obviously made by the same company, thus the workflow is a little easier --though I don't think it's THAT difficult to back and forth with FCP and AE). I think there is still a lot of "residue" from the pre-Premiere CS4 years that has people still working in Final Cut. Basically, entire studios were set up with FCP and thus they are still FCP. I really like Premiere. There are a few things that each can't do that the other can, but mostly it's a personal preference and what "you're used to." If you're starting from scratch, think about who you'll be working with (what they are set up for), what kind of equipment (data) will be in the mix, and where the files will end up. Those things should help inform your decision. 5 years ago people thought I was crazy to be editing a feature in Premier (at the time, it was the only program that could address RED (.r3d) files natively). Now it is neck and neck (if not leading) with the previous undisputed "pro-sumer" champ, and both have become ubiquitous even as "pro" editing software.

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This is my life, I edit and edit and edit and edit...

hi... tnx for informative real world review of Prem vs FCP
I am now in same boat. About to switch from FCP to either Avid or Premier.
Im wondering after moere time on premiere, if you are still hapy with it, or if you switched to AVID or back to FCP?
my use seems to be the same as youre... shorter projects, with quite a bit of AFX integration.
Thanks again for taking the time to post your evaluation.

Thank you for the article, balanced and informative! Our studio made the switch starting last year - we do a considerable amount of feature film finishing and effects work in AE, so that temptation to PP was always there.

There have been a lot of great points posted, and rather than repeat I'll toss out this food for thought:

The suite of Adobe products are clean, balanced and robust. Apple HAD great software, but no longer. When it comes to complex workflows - the KISS mentality wins the race. With the Adobe Suite you get an already streamlined and optimized workflow. Which is huge for us, our integration of FCP to AE (for our complicated workflows) required in house script and software developments and an entire workflow manual that was used in house.

Since the switch almost all of that "fat" has been trimmed, and the increased memory usage and acceleration from the Mercury Playback Engine has sped up our workflow easily 3x. We were so impressed we actually ran some benchmark tests to document the change. Sometimes new just feels faster...

I'm a big Apple fan, in truth. Simple, clean, intuitive....but we are professionals, not consumers. Apple has decided it likes being truly consumer, not prosumer or professional. Adobe has been, and always will be in my estimation, entirely focused on it' professional customers. Couple that with great products, customer service, and price point...

For me is just incredible that all you people haven't yet move to Vegas Pro. Is just such a mystery to me. If you are going to feed your family with this, then you should move to Sony Vegas Pro and stop wasting time in this obsolete editing interfaces. FCPX is just an atempt of bringing some of the speed of the vegas timeline. And you have to taste what is to be inside a "no limits" modern and simple interface. You don't have to do all the things that the computer can do in itself. Like transcoding on shtof like that.

Dem's or Rep's or Liberal's ... our government is currently not serving the people or people just aren't being voiced at all. "America" appears to have some pretty extremist activity (on both sides) of it's own preventing any progress at all ... along with all the other sex scandals and corruption that seems to be the "norm".

But it does make for good news and hence lots of media and hence I'm sure that keeps many folks here working late hours ;)

But don't let the FCPX opinion get you flustered, it is what it is and time will tell what happens to the future of FCPX, but the message that should be understood is DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET. Sadly, some got caught out with this.

I have tried like 10 times to switch to PP CS4, CS5, CS5.5... who the hell is in charge for UI of PP?

It is the worst editing experience of any NLE I know...besides FCPX :)

Markers:

horrible, you hardly see then, there is no way to jump from marker to marker from the keyboard on the timeline. No Marker colors... horrible.

Razor Blade:

There is nooooo way to snap the razor blade to the edit point in the timeline in PP CS5.5... guys this is an absolute muss in editing... the guys who are in charge of the UI are no editors...!!!

Why the hell do you have to activate snapping on tracks? it is absurd and confusing... but default they are off?.... it's crazy.

Yes I know, FCP 7 is old, is 32 bit, ProRes is a muss, titling is very limited... but it is very stable, cutting is an absolut pleasure with it.

Editing is FIRST about cutting, and then come the Post-Production... not the other way around.

Im sure most FCP users, do hate the idea of cutting in PP CS because it is completely inefficient, the UI is full of buttons everywhere, importan things are completely hidden, if you don't know the "tricks" you are lost, and cutting in its timeline is just a pain...

If I more somewhere I will probably move to AVID, If there is something you can really do well in AVID is Cutting, it is stable, it is profesional, it is well thought and it is made with the Cutter and Editor in mind...!!!

I agree with you that Adobe is not squeaky clean. There have been many instances where they have been both cocky and have not listened to their customers. But that appears to have changed for the better for the most part. Audition is definitely a step up from Soundbooth. But it’s included with the suite and unless you’re doing a huge, heavy soundtrack mix, then it’s really very capable. The noise reduction tool alone (called: Noise Reduction (process)-) is really scary how well it works and is worth the price of admission. And yes, Protools rocks. Except for a few highend companies like The Foundry, Assimilate, etc., trusting a company to always service the needs of their customers and be innovative at the same time is always risky. But I think Adobe is really trying to do that now and we can only hope that they stay the course.

Rob, thanks for replying. While I have had my fair share of doing the funky monkey with Windows, it’s been a very small percentage over the years. On one hand, I’m fortunate that I have the skills and experience in fixing and building computers which lets me avoid potential ”gotchas” and missteps with the OS. But on the other hand, it doesn’t take a computer geek to realize that one shouldn’t be running a workstation with all of the eyecandy turned on. People get all hyped up and enamored with the pretty colors and animations and leave all that active. It’s a huge drain on system resources and simply gets in the way of things. It uses both CPU and GPU cycles as well as system memory to do its thing. Why would you want the OS to be juggling that at the same time you’re trying to use the software that you’re trying to do your work with? Plus there’s a bunch of unnecessary background processes that are constantly running and also draining system resources (if anybody wants, I’d be happy to post a list of these) that need to be shutoff. And don’t get me started on page files!

As an example of how confident I’ve been with Windows, I started using Vista x64 from the first public beta as my OS. Everyone thought I was nuts but after they saw the performance and reliability, they quickly changed their tune. While I was still on XP (’05 -’06), I began to see the writing on the wall that everything was starting the march toward 64 bit. So when Vista arrived, I was at the front of the line and have never looked back or regretted it since. The issues that most people were having were because of the way they were migrating from their previous OS and inadequate hardware. Vista was a fail on many levels. It was a nightmare for a lot of people and it never should have been released. When I saw how excited and positive all the super-geeks were when the first private betas of Win 7 were starting to hit, I installed the first beta I could get my hands on and actually got myself a subscription to MS Technet so I would be among the first to get the final RTM. I wasn’t the only one who was using the beta of Win 7 in a production environment.

Anyway, no company is perfect. But the difference between MS and Apple, to me at least, is that MS does stupid things but they haven’t drawn blood or caused me permanent brain damage. But Apple has this smugness that has always left a bad taste in my mouth. And it’s that smugness that has at least in part caused them to do what they have done with FCP.

Now, if I could only get Blackmagic to port Resolve over to Windows . . .

Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium includes Audition which is a full blown DAW (albeit with no control console support, yet) and an absolutely amazing noise reduction filter. And Premiere 5.5 now has audio sync and has a merge feature that will combine the new audio with the video track and create a new single merged clip which can be edited normally. Huge time saver. Did I mention that Premiere has an included, built-in Speech to Text program? Also, probably the number one request from users is for a real-time, professional color grading app/environment in Premiere with control console support. Don't be surprised to see this somewhere between CS6 & 6.5.

The other thing that I have to say, but with all due respect, is why anyone would want to continue supporting a company that only offers a closed, limited ecosystem. I’ve been watching people dive into the Apple universe head first for years and years now and I still don’t understand why. I’m not going to get into a laundry list of things except to say that when I started my career in computers way back when, it was obvious that it was/is a Windows world out there and I could only pick one platform to get good at and have control over. As far as Final Cut goes, it was either impossible and/or ridiculously/prohibitively expensive and time consuming to have rewritten Final Cut from the ground up. Not to mention catch up with Adobe in terms of features and value. In any case, we’ve all now seen their answer to years and years of support and loyalty from everyone in the Final Cut universe. Besides, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t have the luxury of being just an editor. I have to also be a motion graphics artist, an audio engineer, a cameraman, script writer, producer, etc – etc.

I need a suite of programs that can talk to each other and help me be all of those things. Apple either can’t or won’t do that. Kudos to Creative Cow for having this place to talk about all of this.

I don't know, I am not buying all this "Adobe is squeaky clean while Apple is an evil closed ecosystem empire." I've had both Adobe Master Suite since the CS beginning and FCS3 since it came out, and I have seen some crazy crap from Adobe as well as Apple. Audition is nothing to write home about, although it was once a good 20$ app (Cool Edit) and the fiasco between Soundbooth and Audition should put anyone off (and make them just go get ProTools). And if anyone here remembers Ultra, another app purchased, integrated into CS, and then dropped like a hot potato, it should remind us that neither of these software giants is perfect. Then, if you have OSX as a platform and you depend on Adobe, you have to remember how long it took for 64-bit to come to the CS suite - we waited while our Windows brothers did not. So what makes anyone think that history won't repeat? I guess the lesson is to trust no one, and be ready to change software like you would your underwear. Cheers,
Jigs

I wouldn't get too carried away ... Windows is a hugely problematic operating system, even Windows 7 which is just an update of the same Windows Vista code base. I do spend 10X more time just keeping Windows 7 working smoothly with my other Pro apps over Apple's OSX. But when Windows 7 is working well, it's fine and DX11 is considerably more powerful than OpenGL (especially when it comes to shaders).

However, to keep Windows 7 running smoothly, it requires technical knowledge about the OS which is well above and beyond what I would expect an Post production person would want to know and/or should even need to know.

A good example that I recently ran into was my 3Dconnexion device, install was super simple on OSX and it worked flawlessly (especially in Cinema 4D), but install on Windows 7 ended up with "Could not load transport DLL mwmtrans.dll". So after hours of reseach, contact 3Dconnexion support, installing dependency walker (so I could see what was actually using this DLL), I was finally able to trace the problem down to the DLL being shared. So rather than Windows 7 reporting it as being shared and the specific processID (PID)/service/application that was using it, it just returns a rather useless message to the end user (aka me). This IS the big difference between working in OSX and working in Windows.

Also, can't tell you how many times I've had to wipe and re-install everything on my Windows based computers -- a process I've NEVER had to do in OSX. Running Windows Updates is a "Risky" proposition, will it screw anything up, or will it break what wasn't broken, or will it slow my system dow, or will it actually fix stuff? I hate running Windows Updates, it's like rolling the dice 50/50.

So in summary, yes, Windows 7 can be made to work well, if you have the knowledge and patients and time to make it work well.

But I'm not dumping FCP 7, I am slowly moving more of what I do over to CS5.5. And Adobe are offering 50% discount to switch from FCP, so now IS the time to transition. But I think most post production folks will keep using FCP 7 but will start to re-direct their projects into other apps like CS5.5. Over time, FCP 7 will be used less and less. Apple have been VERY clear in re-stating the obvious, FCPX will never be a product for the "Pro" market.

Don't get me wrong, I like my Mac's, case build quality and design are awesome, and very quiet to operate.

When I purchased a MacPro in 2006 (with 30" Cinema HD monitor) it came to about $9000. At the same time I configured a custom PC that I built for about $6000 (including 30" LCD) ... my custom PC had better video cards, faster RAM, faster RAID, memory bandwidth (buffered ECC also) was better on the PC but CPU performance was about the same.

Could I build a PC that is more expensive than a MacPro, sure I can (and have) -- but it's also considerably more powerful with more capacity.

As far as stability, the OS and maturity of the drivers seems to be the determining factor, not the hardware itself nor even what OS one runs.

And then there is overclocking the motherboard, RAM, CPUs (which for the most part just requires some knowledge and proper cooling) -- an option that is VERY difficult to do on any Mac. In fact, threaded rendering is a great way to perform overclocking stability tests. It relatively easy to get 25% more performance from the CPU/motherboard (if you know what you're doing). You may laugh at 25%, but it adds up overtime, especially with big renders over a network -- 4 hour render gets reduced to 3 hours.

I wasn't comparing Low end PC components, I was comparing the exact same components -- remember Intel motherboards and Intel CPUs, the same ones you can buy retail with the only difference being the Apple proprietary EFI64 firmware. PC still comes out cheaper with the same quality components.

A real good example is the ATI HD5770 for a PC is $120, for the Mac the ATI HD5770 is $250 -- the component is EXACTLY the same with the ONLY exception being Apple's boot ROM/firmware.

I did a PP CS5 test project 6 months ago. I was very impressed with many things about the program. It's far more advanced than FCP in many ways. but I did not make the switch at the time.

My biggest issue was bugginess. And autosaves did not save me. I eventually found that render files would become corrupt and completely shut down the program until I deleted all render files. Figuring this out took a couple of days. I had to do this trick several times during the course of the project.

As for dynamic link, it seemed to be lacking in CS5. If I had a big AE comp, there seemed to be no way to render it, so that when I came back to PP, I'd have to do a timeline render - a more temporary and less robust solution than an actual render. If I did an actual render, I'd put that in the timeline and lose the dynamic link. I was happier with my FCP solution of re-rendering with the same file name.

Another issue I had with an easy workaround: when exporting/encoding, there's an innocuous checkbox titled "use previews" in the export dialogue. If you fail to check this, exports can take forever. It basically means that everything in your timeline that needed rendering (dynamic links, multi-layers, etc) are re-rendered from scratch. This is really a 'feature', not a bug. If I'm making a small QT for client, then I'm happy to use the 'iFrame only mpeg' preview files I've been using for speed reasons to create the QTs. If I'm making a final hi-res master, I 'd prefer to re-render everything from the original files. This is better than FCP, which always uses its "preview" files, so that sometimes you're creating an "uncompressed" master from ProRes render files.

I'll be trying out the 5.5 version soon, and intend to move to PP if all goes well.

Am cutting on PP CS6 at the moment and it is a bit of a nightmare at times but there are things i love about it. Regarding the deletion of render files, what I do is separate them from the project folder and keep ONLY project files in that folder. Projects open quickly and I have no Preview corruption. I also keep the project folder separate from the rest of the project. - different hard drive. What I hate is the flat hierarchy thing going on when importing a folder with folders in it. Any best practices you can recommend?

If you're pricing out components, the PC side will almost always come out better ... if you "restrict" yourself to whatever components Apple uses in their MacPro, then sure, it's not that big of difference in price (assuming you buy RAM, SSD externally -- NewEgg).

BUT that's not really a valid comparison as you are restricting component select based solely on what Apple decided to use in their MacPro line. If you are building your own "rigs" (PCs) then there is NO restriction on motherboards, CPU sockets, CPU types, etc. etc. find any manufacturer that fits your budget.

BUT, CPU choice is key. For example, when running Cinebench (to help show real world performance for applications like Cinema 4D), an 8 Core system able to run 16 threads will out perform (by a significant margin) a 12 core 12 thread system. So CPU selection is important, two 4 cores can out perform two 6 cores ... it's not just all about cores.

But back to FCPX, who knows, maybe Apple will address all the missing features and problems ... BUT time doesn't stand still (and that is ultimately what will kill FCPX) ... Adobe are already hinting about CS6.

I agree, but I just hear a lot of people saying that MacPro's are over-priced. In reality, I think they're quite reasonably priced in comparison to similarly equipped brand name PC workstations. But yes, if you don't need the full power and reliability of a workstation, you can definitely find cheaper alternatives in the PC world.

I have no idea what quality of PC people build that "is much cheaper than a Mac." We use Macs and PCs here at COW Headquarters and by the time we trick out a machine to the level of quality that we need, the PCs always cost far more than our Macs. Always.

Can you build cheap PCs? Of course. But only someone who builds low-end machines using the cheapest procs, motherboards, RAM, etc., etc., gets away cheaper than a Mac.

We usually feel good when we match what our Macs cost. But "PCs are much cheaper than Macs." Ain't seen it, except when you are building using price as your cornerstone guiding principle -- then, yes, you can build cheaper than a Mac. But if you want quality, quality costs no matter if it's on a Mac or a PC or Linux.

That said, I am 60, no idiot, am a competitive buyer, and have many years experience buying (and building systems).

Still, "shredding" a Mac in one area doesn't mean you have a PC that can do all that a Mac does. My HP Z800 would pulverize any Mac you could throw at it. But even if I had bought all of the parts in it separately, to build a box that powerful, it would still cost more than any of our Macs.

And yes, we build many of our own servers and even they are pretty hefty in price. We do not build with low-end stuff.

My 2 cents: Very disappointed with FCPX and will not upgrade this time. I started with Premiere before it was Pro. The first time I used "Close Gap" in FCP I did the switch and never went back to Premiere. The meat and Potatoes of FCP is much better in my opinion then Premiere. FCP is good to go for another 2 Years and I HOPE APPLE KEEPS IT'S WORD ON THE LISTED UPGRADES THEY WILL BE MAKING IN THE NEAR FUTURE. I still use Adobe products and LOVE AFTER EFFECTS.

I'm with Andrew Devis, ripple delete...Mr.Kobler how'd you miss that? As a devout Premier user it warms my heart to hear "FCPer's" say that an Adobe product other that PS or AE works for them...ADOBE ROCKS!

There is just one thing bugging me about this entire FCPX release ... why?

Apple are making money, good money, lots of good money and with iCloud, iPhone 5, and iPad 3, Lion ... all soon to be released, they'll be making even more money. As has been pointed out, the development team surrounding the Pro applications is getting smaller and fewer resources.

With Apple's resources, it really would NOT be any significant draw on their bottom line and really wouldn't make any difference from a stock holders perspective. So this is the only puzzle I'm having a hard time understanding. Also, Pro application developers are high quality developers, very intelligent people, the kind of people you WANT to keep.

I could see Apple dumping their Pro applications when the company was hurting for cash (and they did try but couldn't find a buyer), but not the Apple of Today.

Although I have moved on and staying diversified, this FCPX mess still just isn't adding up in my book of logic.

Your article comes at the right time as we're looking to Premiere as a potential solution to the FCP debacle.
A lot of what I do is finishing and preparing "outside" projects for finishing "inhouse," so I'm interested in how Premiere performs in the nitty gritty aspects of the post-editing process. Media management, media consolidation, media transcoding, sorting and searching abilities with clips, relinking media, linking to transcoded media, monitoring audio levels and video signal (it's just a question, please don't tell me to use external monitoring equipment), exporting for various finishing platforms, etc.
Thanks for any responses.

If you've been using FCP prior to the release of X and it met your needs; you will be more than happy with PPro as it is 64 bit and will allow you to use all of the memory in your machine. The interface and capabilities are very similar really.

Don't get yourselves in a whirlwind. The only constant is change, and who knows, Apple is probably going in a different direction and pro editing may no longer be their priority right now. But we'll adapt, we'll learn new things.

I think the biggest problem to the industry is people gobbling up the commercial market and editing full hd canon 5d footage on little office machines, no raids, no capture cards (and in one case, they were using their C drive as the capture drive). The folks in these studios don't even know what a component connection is.

But again on the topic at hand, having experienced the rise and fall of media 100 and DPS velocity Q, and cinewave, this apple thing is just another bump on the road of television production.

As a Final Cut Pro editor and an Apple enthusiast (not afraid to admit that), the betrayal of the pro market deeply saddens me. Will I cease using Apple computers? No, definitely not. I still believe in those. Will I abandon Final Cut Pro 7? No, not immediately. But I'd be committing career suicide by not exploring my options.

That said, I really enjoyed reading this article and it has helped me put into perspective the decisions I will be making in the next few months. PrP, with its integration with the rest of CS5.5 and quick performance, has been an enticing NLE. But, as many probably are, I was apprehensive about switching over and integrating it with client projects. Clearly it's doable, especially from an FCP editor's perspective. I should have just went for it! Well written and unbiased article.

To import into a bin other than the top level just create your bin and OPT + Double Click to open the bin in a tab in your project panel and then when you right click and choose import in the media browser it will import into that bin. Although i would like to see a keyboard shortcut to import from the media browser rather than having to use the right click option ...

You can also apple double click to open the folder up a level in your folder/bin tree and use the back navigation icon at the top of the project panel if that is easier than using tabbed bins. You can change these keyboard shortcuts on the the general tab of your preferences.

This is also the way to create titles etc, create the titles bin, OPT + double click and create your titles and they all go into the right bin.

Also to close a gap, right click in the gap and choose ripple delete.
Andrew

Brand loyalty? Where's Apples customer loyalty? In my 30 years as an engineer I've seen Apple leave many of it's loyal customers stranded with hardware and software without an upgrade path or backward compatibility. I've seen Apple screw over its suppliers too, one of which I worked for at the time.

Ten years ago, I put together a screaming (at the time) dual chip AMD Athlon system, a Matrox RT-2000 analog capture board (which came with some version of Adobe Primere) running Microsoft NT for my first NLE system. It was before digital cameras were cheap enough so I had a Canon L2 Hi8 camera. Long story short ... couldn't keep that system running long enough enough to complete a single project. NT was just not stable enough.

After much encouragement from a fellow filmmaker, I broke down and bought a Mac Pro with dual G5 processors and Final Cut Studio. Worked great. Fast forward about eight years and I'm running a used Mac Pro w/ Intel processors. Works even better.

Afer working with it for eight years, I think Apple makes the finest personal computer hardware of any company out there. The fit and finish is second to none. OS X, based on UNIX, is functional and robust.

So why would I switch to PC hardware? (We all know why I'm switching to PP.)

First off, I don't really like Apples business policy, as I touched on at the first of this comment. Second, as others have said, I think Apple will be dropping the Mac Pro pretty soon. (And I don't expect much warning either.)

The main reason is that my Mac Pro is getting a bit long in the tooth and I'm fixing to invest heavily in the new Adobe software. Adobe forces me choose between OS X and Windows, so I don't want to buy it again if I switch to a PC later. (This dilemma has delayed my decision to switching to PP for about a year and a half so far.)

So what do you guys think? Should I switch to Windows 7 64 bit or hang in there with the Mac Pro to the bitter end?

Maybe I could just install Windows 7 on the Mac Pro and then take my time about upgrading to new hardware. I've run Windows 7 32 bit on this Mac Pro using Sun's Virtual Box and it worked well.

"Adobe forces me choose between OS X and Windows, so I don't want to buy it again if I switch to a PC later. "

Rob, AFAIK, Adobe allows you a one-time only switch from one platform to another. They send you a form where you agree to destroy the old software, then you pay shipping and they send you the software on your new platform. May want to check and make sure that policy is still in effect.

I'd be interested to know what specs you put in your HP estimate. A similarly equipped HP workstation usually ends up being around the same price as a MacPro. Using an HP xw8600 on a daily basis, I can tell you it's definitely on par with a MacPro. Very powerful, very reliable and definitely well put together.

I tried to match the specs that Jim suggested. "six core i7 with 12+ gigs of ram and solid state drives" I went to the Apple store and configured it that way (one SSD + three 2GB drives), then went to the HP store and did the same. Hardware-spec-wise they are a close match but I do think Apple's harware is better designed and OS-X is a better OS than Windows 7. I was also suprised to see the price that low for the HP.

The Mac Pro I have now I bought used from a fellow video editor for about $2500. It's served me well. I just think the writing is on the wall ... Apple is going to discontinue the Mac Pro like sometime soon. So I don't really want to buy another one only to get stranded with no upgrade path.

Also I'm very impressed with Windows 7 64 bit. I leave it running for weeks at a time without having to reboot it. It is light-years ahead of every previous Microsoft OS.

As far as the Windows GUI interface goes, I don't find it appreciably different from OS-X. In fact there are some things about Windows I like better. For example you can resize a window from any frame edge.

I also like the OS-X single menu paradiem less that the Windows paradiem of a menu on most every app more "intuitive". However I think OS-X has a better OS API than Windows by far.

Some of this I attribut to which GUI I was exposed to first (X11 and Gem ... anybody remember Gem used with CP/M from Digital Research, Inc.?)

To be fair to the MacPro, it is a workstation. To get an accurate comparison, price out an HP workstation, select two processors (you can pretty much find the exact same Xeons that the MacPro has). Make sure you get ECC ram. DO NOT price your MacPro with memory from the Apple site b/c it's way overpriced. Just price both with a minimum 6 GB of ram, assuming that you will get your extra ram from a third party vendor for either system. DO NOT price your MacPro with SSD drives from Apple b/c you can also get those from a 3rd party vendor for a lot less. Price both with a basic Sata 3.0 drive. Do all that and you will have a closer estimate of a MacPro vs. a similarly equipped HP. Comparing a MacPro to an HP Pavilion or Elite system is really an apples to oranges thing. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't have a mid-range tower that is comparable. In light of their push towards the middle market, maybe this is what the MacPro line will devolve into.

Having said all that, I would personally go the PC route if I was starting from square one. However, I would likely build a monstrous workstation for substantially less than the cost of either a MacPro or an HP workstation. For under $4000, you could put together a 12-core system built around an EVGA SR2 motherboard, 24GB of RAM and a GTX580 card that would give you great CUDA support and the added bonus of playing Crysis at max settings ;)

True, but HP is just one of many PC integrators. Try the same comparison with these guys: http://www.boldata.com/workstations, I think you'll find that you can get more choices at a lower cost than Apple hardware. I've got two of these machines at home and four at work... all of them have been rock solid on 64bit Windows 7. I'll continue to purchase machines from these folks until I find someone better.

Agree, the Windows PC side is far far cheaper and adds up when you start adding more NET render servers ... you can buy 100X more processing power vs. Apple hardware. The downside is that you have to "endure" Windows 7 interface and endless security updates that often fail to install and/or break more than they fix. And when something goes wrong with Windows 7, it often results in completely wiping the hard drives and re-installing everything from scratch (something I've NEVER had to do with OSX on my Macs).

So Windows PC are cheaper, but they require more attention and work to keep them going.

It seems odd that only a few people mention soundtrack pro or color. To me these were the real differentiators when I switched from pp. Just pp vs. Fcp is not a huge gap. But no color and no soundtrack pro is. I'm hoping cs6 will have audition integrated well. But I don't see the ease and depth of color readily available. Much of what color does can be accomplished in after effects. However opening up clip by clip, the color finesse clunky interface, and tracking vignettes being so much more labor intensive, etc. Isn't promising.

Sound: I'm hoping Adobe beefs up Premiere's in-program capabilities soon (already superior to FCP from within the program --we actually mixed/designed a lot of our sound from within Premiere), but I think any "real" sound design/mix should be done in a more established Pro Audio Program anyway.

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This is my life, I edit and edit and edit and edit...

Thanks for the comments. I'll try colorista. I was working on a doc in PP cs3 and it was so unstable for large projects that I never messed with plugins. The first step in the troubleshooting was always to disable plugins. Now I'm on a mac but I have CS4 along side FCP and do use both; but have simply preferred to do my main work in FCP since I could export the whole multitrack sound to work in Soundtrack Pro which was pretty robust. I love After Effects for compositing graphics and effects; I just think it's cumbersome for color correction.

For the record, we've had pretty good luck with "simple" sound stuff like adding room reverb, levels, fade in/out, etc. from within Premiere. It also has sample accurate editing (you're not limited to frames).

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This is my life, I edit and edit and edit and edit...

"I am pretty sure Audition once was something called CoolEdit a long time ago"

Yes, Audition used to be called Cool Edit when it was owned by Syntrillium, but it was never free. It was (and still is) very popular in radio production. I'm guessing that's why Adobe didn't EOL it when they replaced it with Soundbooth in the CS4 suite.

I think Colorista is great for quick, easy grading but I think someone who's used to Color or Davinci Resolve will find it a bit limited. Wish there was an equivalent to either of these two apps on the Windows side :(

Correct, not as robust, but good for at least a first pass (and even a whole project, depending on where it's going), and probably approaching Color when used in After Effects. But yes, I would prefer a dedicated colorist on a Davinci to either program any day. :-)

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This is my life, I edit and edit and edit and edit...

Funny you should mention SoundTrack Pro ... I prefer Logic Pro (which I have to say is still very much a competitive package, for whatever reason Apple seem to want to keep Logic Pro alive) to do my audio needs.

But Motion 4 and Motion 5 are still way way way behind After Effects ... a good example is working in Cinema 4D, then exports to AE are so much better and more flexible than the export to Motion. I can't envision using Motion at all after being exposed to AE.

Heck even the Cinema 4D training tutorials on the "Extras DVD" are mostly focused around exports to Adobe products, not a single mention of Apple's products ... C4D still supports Apple's products like Shake and Motion, but I gotta wonder for how long?

64 bits alone was reason enough to change for good last year. As it stands now - there are no compelling reasons to cut anything on any previous version of FCP and quite frankly don't know why you would bother with X now.

Soundtrack Pro was awesome though. Adobe Sound Booth is a disappointment to put it lightly. Haven't tried Audition - seems messed up it doesn't come bundled with the CS5 Production "Premium" suite (Adobe?). Lucky for me I rarely do anything exotic with audio.

BTW - If someone hasn't posted this yet - you can import any sequence or full project into any other project in Premiere Pro.

I've already switched to Premiere Pro for the same reasons - anyone paying attention could have seen YEARS ago that Apple was losing interest in the pro market (fickle, demanding and small market size) in favor of their consumer goods (sales more based on identity and marketing, flexible attitudes etc.). I don't blame them for this, but pros need to start looking elsewhere rather than wasting more time and dollars on a system that won't be around much longer.

I think Adobe's next step really needs to be the acquisition of a powerful color correction tool comparable to Color, and integrate it directly with PP and AE. They have a window of opportunity here, and one that I think precludes the option of building such a tool from scratch in-house.

If they do this, the transition to PP from FCP will be so much more comfortable and justified.

I was disappointed that there was no mention of Premiere's failure to address audio sync (syncing external audio with video using time code and a smart slate). Perhaps this issue has been resolved in CS5, but this was the major shortcoming of Premiere CS4.2 when we were in post for our recent feature film. We had an assistant sync dialogue in Final Cut using RED camera time code and the time code on the audio track, and then we had to import all that footage from Final Cut into Premiere. It should also be noted that we had to use an older version of Final Cut (9), as Final Cut 10 would not allow exports that worked with Premiere.

Other than that (and the MASSIVE frustration of audio and video not being linked in the BINS --only on a timeline), we had great success with Premiere CS4.2 over Final Cut in post.

We decided to go with Premiere for editing our feature, because at the time, it was the only program addressing native RED files. Final Cut claims to have addressed this with their more recent releases, but the issue still seems pretty hinky in FCP, while Premiere does a FANTASTIC job of accessing R3D in the edit.

I do have to reiterate how frustrating it is (in Premiere) having to sync all audio visually on a timeline (no audio time code support), and then how you have to cut and paste audio+video clips from that timeline instead of being able to link audio/video in the bins so you can grab footage directly from the bins (vs. having to grab from a timeline). Hopefully this has already been addressed in CS5 or will be addressed in the next Premiere release.

Other than that... viva la Premiere!

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This is my life, I edit and edit and edit and edit...

I like change ... but not for the sake of change. I returned FCPX just like many others after trying it and deciding it isn't actually reducing my time to complete tasks. Even after "learning" the new workflow, it was just that, learning a different workflow, NOT learning a more efficient workflow.

If you can list how the workflow is more efficient in FCPX, then please do so, I'm curious. Even with all the missing functionality in FCPX, I could have lived with it if it was "that much faster" and was that much more efficient -- but FCPX isn't that.

Please do list the mis-information.

Motion 5 is just a 64bit version of Motion 4, interface is still very much the same only more colorful. It's never been a workflow I liked, it's very uncreative. Would have been nice to see a node view rather than the same old hiearchy layout ... give me some options to view my projects that works best for me. Did that happen, no, SSDD. Parameter rigs isn't that compelling, and that's about all I can see that is new. It would have been nice to see Motion 5 work with real 3D objects even if only at a somewhat primitive level, but again nothing.

And then Compressor 4, that truely has NOT change at all.

FCPX was 2-3 years in the making and that's the best they can do? I'm sorry, but I don't have another 2-3 years waiting for FCPX to catch up to FCP 7 let alone CS6 or CS7 of PP (and other products that are now 3 years ahead of Apple). Apple isn't going to just maraculiously catch up to the rest of the post production offerings that exist today -- it's VERY clear Apple just are NOT putting in the resources needed to be competitive in post production market.

Those of us who have been Premiere Pro users for some time have often tried to communicate many of the features you mention, but many editors simply didn't have the option to change over if they wanted to. FCP had replaced Avid as an "industry standard" and inter-operability with others simply dictated that you use FCP.

I think Apple's stockholders will ultimately like the decision to move to FCPX for Apple's bottom line...but I think Adobe and Avid are more than happy to throw the disenfranchised professional FCP editor a lifeline... :-)

No app is perfect and even as a 10 year Premiere/Premiere Pro user, I can tell you I share some of your critiques (mouse wheel moving the sequence window up and down instead of horizontally is one that I can endorse immediately) are right on.

What I can say is that it appears that Adobe is very aware of FCP editor's wants/needs...maybe even more than PPro editor's requests...but I do hope that this doesn't cause PPro to suddenly become an FCP placebo. Some of us chose PPro when there was still a choice.

Im a firm believer in multilingual when it comes to software and knowing the benefits for workarounds. Hell I got into the NLE game with Pr 3. I was pissed when they pulled up shop off the mac. I even have CS5 suite.

My main gruff is this wave of capitalization based on missinfo. I have seen Larry Jordan's quotes from initial secret release taken to a whole new level of negative hype.

Am i writing a book? no. dunno where you got that idea, but if i was it might be called "dissection of misdirection post 2011.06.21"

at the same time this is version 1 of a whole new tool based on workflows that are here to stay. I firmly believe this is a tool that is not based around linear editing. It is the outgrowth of the NLE.
Change is hard.
becoming obsolete yikes that sucks

Not that any of this "who copied who" stuff matters, but I learned Avid in 1997, and then in 1998, got hired at a film school that couldn't afford an Avid. They had a Premiere 4 on a Mac with a Media 100 card, and it was NOT at all like video editing. It didn't even use a source-record monitor metaphor - and I could never get the freaking capture card to work.

Then FCP came out, and it was like Avid, but much more intuitive and user friendly (and of course, not as powerful - but we're just talking about interface in this thread, right? I heard Premiere 5 copied the interface of FCP/Avid, but I never used it, so I don't really know... But the idea that FCP copied 1998 Premiere is not the way I recall it at all...

I wonder how much desinformation there is about this.
sorry to see coments like "Where is your brand loyalty?"
Inteligence is not brand loyalty - Brand must be loyal to ME (to costumers). That means bug fixes, updates to get more of new technologies, make the workflow easier and faster. etc. If a brand forget about users and don´t offer that enymore. How can someone be loyal?

You all must know Final Cut was created by the same person who created Adobe Premiere. The Great Randy Ubillos. Adobe released their firts versión of Adobe Premiere For Mac (not Windows) in 1991

The history is shorten to this. in the beggining this decade when Apple was about to bankrupcy, Adobe stop supporting Premiere for Apple. Them came Mr Windows (yes, Mister Gates - Do you remember?) to help Apple so the company sort out the odds.. The history toke a new direction...

The Coup d’État of Adobe’s Premiere
At the end of the 90´s. As Adobe's interest in maintaining Premiere began to wane, Apple worked to find other developers interested in delivering QuickTime applications. In 1996, Apple began work with Avid on a QuickTime-based, consumer video editor tool called Avid Cinema.

A few months before, in 1995, Randy Ubillos and other members of the Premiere team at Adobe left to work for Macromedia.

At the time, Macromedia's core business was selling Director, an authoring tool used to create multimedia presentations. Director was deeply integrated with QuickTime, so hiring away Adobe's Premiere group seemed like a good way to develop Macromedia's business into the realm of digital video.

Ubillos and his team wanted to deliver a new, professional level video editor based on QuickTime that went beyond what Adobe had in mind for Premiere.

The new app was called KeyGrip, and was first previewed at the National Association of Broadcasters event in 1996. Macromedia later renamed it as Final Cut.

That´s why. Adobe premiere and Final cut are just "sisters aplications". That´s why the look very alike, and behave so similar.

Final Cut maintained an edge because the superiority of Apple platform while Adobe seemed to lost their north supporting only the windows platform but now they are focused as Leaders in multimedia industry they are ver committed to the industry. Adobe has pulled out an ABSOLUTE profesional tool to the Films and TV industry. They are the EDGE of media technologies nowadays. They are investing Hard to get this goal, and their are going to get it without a doubt.

When you use Adobe, insert special FX in AE, do great soundtrack with Soundbooth, retuouch pictures with photoshop, burn your dvd with Encore WITHOUT export anything. you´ll be pleased you workflow is accelerated. you are going to understand what EDGE means. and you will forget about "Brand Loyalty"

If you don´t want to accept it is not problem of Adobe.
The industry will takes it´s own tendencies..
Best Reggards
Eddio Pina

You do realize that Randy U. (now at Apple who produced FCPX) created PP for Adobe many years ago right?

Apple's hardware is Intel based, the only part of Apple hardware (excluding iPhone iPad) that IS Apple's is the proprietary EFI64 that enables booting OSX. EFI64 firmware is just that, firmware NOT hardware, BIG difference.

You writing a book on FCPX or something? Training series? ;)

Anyone who is serious about post production NEEDS to expand their basket ... this is just common sense and a good safety net, because Apple has absolutely NO CONCERN in regards to customer loyalty ... the sooner you believe that the less "exposed" you'll be.

It's not like folks are dumping FCP 7, they are dumping FCP X (just look at Apple's updated refund policy) and finding "additional" solutions to post production work because it's clear Apple are NOT wanting to retain the Pro level market ... for better or worse, it is what it is.

@Sean
No way are going to make the David and Goliath argument.
Does adobe make hardware? No.
Adobe's biz IS it's software. Come on now that doesnt even shoot straight.
Adobe is a victim of apples success?
Has apple gotten to big? I'd foster that argument maybe.

That's exactly the point, Phil: "Adobe's biz IS it's software.", more specifically "professional creative software" and since we're creative professionals, I think you can see where the argument arises.

Apple is primarily a hardware company. They want you to buy hardware. They make software that makes their hardware more appealing. When that software isn't appealing anymore, we move on. It's nothing personal. It isn't because people's opinions have been bought. It's just business. If your spouse is cheating on you and your marriage is failing you can stick it out for the sake of nostalgia or you can move on.

Loyalty is a two-way street. I think the frustration many FCP users are feeling is that Apple doesn't seem to have a lot of loyalty to them. This line says it best: " If Apple's Pro apps went away tomorrow, Apple would barely feel it on its bottom line or stock price. If Adobe's Pro apps went away, so would Adobe."

My apologies though. I got really upset at how post June 21 layered up and was nothing but a jumpship mentality.
Again. I was super freaking hot. It wasn't really just you but you and a few others caught the backblast. Sorry

I could be wrong on this, but I think you can enable progressive downloading by opening your encoded file in Quicktime (either X or 7 Pro), and simply re-saving the file--this should flatten the Quicktime file, keeping all the codec information the same, and not re-encoding it. I believe flattening is one of the key parts of progressive downloading, and if it's not flattened for some codecs, it'll have to wait for the entire file to download before playing.

You didn't mention CS Live for client reviews. While I haven't tried it in a real world setting, it does seem very cool. PP encodes and posts your spot directly from timeline to their site. Client reviews and makes comments. Comments appear in PP with direct links to timeline. Seems ideal considering the number of clients I have who prefer to work via email.

I use CS Live all the time it's really convenient. They were a little behind rolling it out with CS5 so the second year has been gratis as well as the first. I'm going to hate paying for it - but it's worth having for what I do.

Very good article Helmut. I'm mainly and Avid editor but in the last years I have edited more in FCP as most of my clients were Apple fans or Apple converts. I even had to buy an IMac to be able to keep doing freelance jobs at home. Although I will never regret that decision (I think the IMac is a very good piece of hardware and VMWare makes it perfect for my needs) I never-ever thought about going fully FCP as as you say "the writing was in the wall". Apple has become a huge corporation and the pro arm of business wasn't the most profitable one so seems like they are killing it off. To bad that many pro customers were made to believe FCPX was the best thing since sliced bread. Too bad too that one of the companies I work for has invested not may months ago in a FinalCut Server implementation (again misled from a consultant company which swore us there were no plans from Apple to ditch it). Now everybody is facing a tough call: which system to migrate to?
My recommendation is always the same: Avid if you want the best editing tool for editors, premiere if you are more budget conscious, as (almost) every single company in this business buys a Creative Suite for After Effects and Photoshop anyway.
For me, I keep hearing many good things about 5.5 and surely will be using it for freelance work more and more in the future. But I cannot forget how betrayed by Adobe/Matrox I felt when I bought an Axio SD system with the then CS2 Suite; it was an absolute nightmare to work with, full of bugs and crashes and I was told that it wasn't very good for projects over 30 mins of length... after buying it! I have to admit it got better with updates but then it was discounted with the introduction of the MXO. Maybe is the time to trade it and get an upgrade (anyway I haven't been using it for 2 years) or sell it?
So "shit happens" is my point and you are always going to feel ditched when it happens to you, as we invest a lot of money and time in our systems. That's why I agree with the point raised of going for a company that is merely focused on the pro users (Adobe and Avid). Is going to be interesting to see how this move impacts on Apple's hardware sales, bearing in mind that all the other tools work on PCs (Adobe's even better than on Macs) and many clients will be well pissed off with them.

One last question: are the Premiere Pro project files still soooo massive as you keep growing the project and do they take as long to open as they used to do? That was my main beef with them because it made any serious work a horrendous experience...

[Alberto Corredor]"One last question: are the Premiere Pro project files still soooo massive as you keep growing the project and do they take as long to open as they used to do? That was my main beef with them because it made any serious work a horrendous experience..."

Hey Alberto,

With CS5.5 PrPro opens massive projects very quickly. The first time a project is opened, reference files are created for each clip. After that CS5.5 looks at the reference file and opens very fast. Interestingly it seems to check at the beginning of each day if the referred to file has changed. Then subsequent project openings are lightning fast, even with 4000 clips.

I will say that Adobe has ticked me off in the past about how they price their software packages and how I can get them online.

I must edit on machines with German keyboards and German OSX system language but I speak and "edit" in English so much better.

If I want to buy my "American" version of the software, the edition I would use editing in California, I must try to jump hoops online trying to pay for the American English *the DEFAULT Adobe Suite version while being pushed into the UK site where Adobe charges another arm and a leg for the exact same software.

I do not know if I can actually buy the Adobe CS5 suite English at a fair price--yes, the Foreign versions are unfairly priced.

What is, I suppose, encouraging, or discouraging, is how often Adobe sends mandatory updates along for each product.

Practically everytime I open up my computer I see the Adobe Acrobat updater bouncing away. It makes me think several things:

1. Great, these Adobe guys and gals are really on top of security issues
2. Hmm, this is a pain
3. When are they going to just get it right?
4. With this update what goes away forever that I use?

So, Adobe, for me is the future of my video editing.

Now I hope that the team takes a fresh look at these "comparison" articles and puts some re-doubled effort into refining and streamlining and expanding Premiere into the "industry standard".

I ran Windows machines for years before having to work on an iMac at the office. Then on deciding to use FCP we bought the MacPro to use for Apple Studio 3 video editing.

I have editing experience on Windows and iMac, MacPro, and MacBookPro.

You mention that "PCs do not work well at all in this part of the world, unfortunately."

Considering that you are in Kathmandu, is it not just possible that the "PC's" you are referring to may have been an apples to pomegranates comparison?

The components for "pc boxes" in your end of the world, as you so well know, have historically tended to be dumps of motherboards and drives and video cards that had flunked the Western world market. Even though Hong Kong is a huge market relatively near you it is loaded with inferior material, too.

It was next to impossible to tell from the packaging that a particular motherboard, for instance, had a "bad run" from May 2004 to January 2005 that resulted in a lot of premature failures or inabilities to keep running stably. But, it was cheap and was being offered as if it was a good solution with upgraded Hz cycles.

Many companies did and still do send their inferior stock to third world markets. I found this in every single component used in Latin America. When putting together PC boxes I would comb the internet for days, haunting all the forums, googling for motherboard problems, etc in trying to avoid buying inferior components.

If I would go with an order to put together a few PC's from off-the-shelf components I would find that brand new nicely wrapped components happened to wind up on shelves in Latin America because the manufacturers knew that my end of the world was a convenient dumping ground for their factory rejects and "badly reviewed/failing" components.

Then, too, as I would suspect in your area of the world, the majority of system and program software offered for install was pirated and was ineligible for driver upgrades, etc.

Finally, the problem of widely fluctuating AC power standards.

So, Jiggy, is it just possible that your PC's back in the day were operating under some handicaps, too?

Buying Mac boxes gave a level of component control that you could not get if you put together your own PC's. And I am assuming you never would have purchased HP or Dell whose boxes, loaded with bloated proprietary operating system software, were completely inappropriate for video editing.

yes that's all true. we have to deal with chinese imports and knockoffs, as well as EVERYTHING that a client gives us is infected with a virus, from scripts in MS word, to entire drives full of media to camera chips and so on. There is no way around it and futile to fight it. Solution: go mac.

The line conditioning for power is an interesting problem, and we have spent tons of money on that, as Apple products tend to blow MUCH easier then others, to include chinese knockoff equipment. But it's mostly just the power adapters, so we keep a drawer full of extras.

But as long as I live here (and that's as long as live pretty much) I think I will purchase Apple hardware, as long as it remains as reliable as it has been. It does no good to buy Dell or HP, and then wait FOREVER to get a proprietary part, and makes no sense putting in Chinese junk when things go bad, as it will just blow up again.

We happen to be very lucky, as we have an Ex-Genius bar dude working for the Apple distributor here, and they are a very professional bunch of folks...the best dealer in town really. They have their own repair centre certified by Apple and labour for out-of-warranty repairs is dirt cheap. It's actually quite wonderful - includes free office pickups and dropoffs, with house calls too.

Decent support for Sony, Dell, HP, and the rest is non-existent, as one would expect.

I have worked in video for about 27 years, and not once has a client given me a virus... but then I have not worked much for the porn industry ;) But seriously, youve made a bunch of very strange comments.

The truth from my perspective is

Most pc's are made in china, including macs.

in any case, who cares, china probably make better stuff than the usa anyway (do you remember the term "Jap crap" when we all said the Japanese made junk?)

Not sure where you are Mark, but in the developing world, it's a dirty place. Asia is lost cause. I've had clients bring me PCs who worked for major International banks with rootkits, malware, and bots installed. Most orgs in Nepal have just given up...click Ignore and the problem goes away. Russia is the same. Forget Pakistan, India, and China. That covers most of the planet. Europeans and Americans (for the most part) play in a pristine playground, without much to really worry about. But in the rest of world, things are very different. Good luck!
Jigs

Hey mate,
wow, sounds horrific!
I live just south of london... so reasonably free from those risks, the biggest danger being british sarcasm and irony ;) (I am of south african decent!)
cheers, good luck with whatever you decide in our NLE future!
Mark.

My comments to Jiggy would seem strange if you have never ever seen a single virus (that you know of).

The point I was making is that when someone says categorically that PC's never worked very well for this and that I first wonder "what do you mean by PC?" What were the components, the Windows version, etc?

I owned a Tandy 2000 in 1984 that had been sold to me as a PC-compatible and they said it was "the same thing as PC". Lo and behold a guy named Bill Gates was changing my world that year. Within six months Tandy had abandoned their most advanced "PC" and had jumped on the bandwagon of something called MS-DOS, which required new programs written that did not run on my "PC-compatible". Close but not close enough.

Years later, when I ordered my first "professional grade" personal computer, PC, I had a Korean company in Orange county, California put it together. I could drive down and see the place and the kind of PC's they fabricated from off-the-shelf components. I knew after several frustrating years in Dell and HP land for non-video projects that I NEVER wanted one of those branded boxes for a video editing application.

Later in Latin America I had to create some "PC" computers with Windows XP Professional installed and was introduced to sub-standard components that caused crashes.

But on my high dollar Windows "dream machine" it never crashed. Year after year it never crashed with XP Professional. Usually a crash would by then be caused by driver issues for some software that had not updated in a while and could not talk to a particular video display.

So, when I finally started 4 years ago working on MacPro laptops and MacPro towers and iMac's I was INFURIATED, VEHEMENTLY SCREAMING about Apple's STUPIDEST feature ever!

Can you guess?

Who is the Apple idiot that integrated the FINDER with the actual running of the whole OS X? Not even Windows ever perpetrated that one on users.

That spinning beachball from the very beginning was the death of a brand new iMac. I did some lowgrade Final Cut Pro 6 editing on a brand new iMac before the MacPro arrived. Apple's rank, rank Imbecility made sure that if any Program could not locate files, even one file, or if an inadvertent keystroke misnamed a file for even a second then the Apple piece of finery would have to be keystroked into submission and shut down at a bad place in Final Cut.

Or, too often the blankety-blank Apple Finder would so engulf all resources on some stupid task that it was cold shut down time. Then a trip to Safe Mode land where the directory itself had to be repaired.

So, yeah, yeah, I use Macs everyday -- five flavors sit on one huge desk at the moment -- but, no, never, do I count as a Fanboy.

I agree with Mike on this. I started out on Avids but because of the high startup costs needed to look for a lower cost alternative for my home system. I wanted to work PC and eventually chose Speed Razor over Premiere - both having similar GUIs and workflow. FCP was only a twinkle in Apple's eye at the time. Speed Razor unfortunately didn't progress but Premiere has now become a real power workhorse for me. So much so that with CS5 it would be my recommended system to anyone for pro editing. FCP workflow came from Speed Razor and Premiere - not the other way round and they've been playing catch up ever since.

FCP workflow came from Speed Razor? I have to smile at that one. FCP's workflow was inspired by a target with Avid's face painted on it. I met the original developers along with then head of Macromedia, Bud Colligan, back in 1996 when they were developing Key Grip -- and all they talked about was Avid this and Avid that.

I even did a TV show once with Randy Ubillos, who was at Macromedia at the time, and even in that show, he referred to Avid on a number of occasions.

If it seemed like Speed Razor was an influence anywhere, it is likely due to the fact that Avid was light years ahead of everyone else at the time and they were all chasing Avid. Therein lies the similarity.

Thanks, Helmut. That helped me a lot because I am a FCP 7, Studio 3 user who is kicking Adobe's tires in the showroom.

Just one thing about Premiere really surprised from your review--the inability to open more than ONE project? But you can have multiple timelines inside one project, right?

In FCP 7 in one project for one client I may have footage from two days of shooting which I am utilizing for 5 separate short movies being edited on separate timelines that I can skip to by selecting a timeline tab.

And I will use another timeline for putting together open and closing titling that I can copy and paste onto other timelines in the same project.

In FCP 7, not only can I open more than one project, but I can create separate timelines to lay out related footage for movie 1, movie 2, etc. while keeping a separate timeline for the "master" edited version.

Does Premiere allow more than one timeline to exist inside one project?

Also, (maybe you can do this in FCP too) you can stack one timeline over the other and see them both at once. I do this a lot when I'm editing interviews. I stick the whole interview clip in one timeline, and the project in the timeline beneath it. Then I can play through the top timeline, and when I find something I want, drag it to the bottom. I then delete the part I used from the top timeline. This keeps me from reusing footage by accident. Another way I work is to start with the entire interview in the top timeline, and then edit that all down to soundbites that I want. Then, when I start putting the program together, I can grab the soundbites fully edited and move them to the bottom.

Thanks for the comparison. It was only today that my partner and I discussed the fact that we are going to have to look at other editing alternatives seeing that Apple will no longer be supporting FCP like it should.

Think Premiere is definitely a good place to start. Like you said so many of us are already using other Adobe software in our workflows.

Ive been an FCP guy since 2003- converted on my mac from premiere 6.5. In 2009, I took a day job and have been using CS4. It only took me a week or so to convert- a month to be totally fluid, and frankly there are only little things I miss.

AUDIO is very different- worth a whole series of articles- as Premiere has stereo AND mono tracks- weird, yea, but it works once you get used to it. NICE plug-ins go either on tracks or clips- and you can send stuff out to soundbooth for cleanup.

My favorite difference was that titles don't make child iterations. You correct a namekey- it corrects globally.

Great article, I came to the same conclusions and have started the full on move to Adobe's platform ... however, I'll be using Windows 7 and not OSX. Adobe's apps seem to work better under 64bit Windows 7 computers and the hardware is cheaper and more flexible.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer OSX, but like the article points out, you do NOT want to be tied to Apple for anything "Pro" related ... that includes Mac hardware ... which is really Intel hardware which is a lot less expensive without Apple's EFI64 ;)

But, I think Mr. Jobs has greatly under estimated this "niche" market and how it will affect the rest of Apple's hardware line and applications line and reputation. Steve needs to learn a lesson from Intel or AMD ... you NEED to have the fastest CPU/chipset even if the actual sales of those top tier CPUs is tiny compared to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tier slower CPU/Chipsets. Having the best reflects on EVERYTHING else in the company, now Apple is really just an expensive, looks good, gadget company.

Q.I couldn't find a way to specify a logging bin for footage I was importing via the Media Browser. It would just import onto the top level of the Project panel.

A. I think you just have the bin that you want highlighted and it goes into that folder instead of the main project folder.

Q.One Final Cut editing feature that didn't have a Premiere equivalent was Final Cut's Close Gap command, which closed a gap on the Timeline if the playhead was positioned in the gap. I missed that! From what I could tell, the closest you get in Premiere is to click a gap to select it, and then hit the Backspace or Delete key.

A. Right click the gap and you get an option to remove it. (ripple delete)

Q. I did encounter a couple of crashes during my 5 week project, but no more than I seemed to get when using Final Cut. In each case, thanks to aggressive auto-saves, I was always able to recover quickly.

A. Crashes usually stem for 3 things...at least this is what I have noticed. 1. Multiple plugins working together within the same nested sequence that dont particularly like eachother. One way around this is to re-nest a sequence and apply the plugin to its own new sequence. This is especially important for time remapping with twixtor...and other temporal plugins. 2. Moving a parameter or timeline while it is still processing things (especially with heavy nested sequence. Dont move the timeline indicator across heavy sequences with multiple effects and plugins). 3. Not having the correct updates.

Anyway...if I misunderstood your questions...sorry. Just trying to give my input. I LOVE premiere, and have always wondered why people pick final cut over premiere. Native support of DSLR is KEY for me.

As a Vegas user the Premiere UI and usability in terms of basic timeline editing is such an utter trainwreck (easily the worst of any Adobe product, and I'm a 20 year user of Adobe products) that PPRO is a total non-starter for me. Vegas is like breaking free of a straightjacket and running through fields of wildflowers by comparison. PPRO could be a good product but the UI is right there with Blender as the worst I've ever experienced.

Great article, thanks for the insight. I have been editing in FCP since the days of FCP3 back in 2002.... I was so saddened to see that FCPX was really more like iMoviePro. I do not plan on upgrading to X like I would have with any other previous version, and as you mentioned, I, too am fed up with the fact that Apple's Pro Department has been MIA for so many years....

Adobe has been in my workflow for a while now with Photoshop and After Effects, and people in our office use Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and InDesign as well. They are great about their updates and listening to their Pro users for feedback to make the applications better. So even though it won't be for a while still, I do look forward to the day that I can start playing around in PP.

Again, thanks for the great article.... really useful stuff for someone like me to read.

I very much enjoyed the article. I went from PP cs3 to final cut. Now I'm guessing I'll go back. What I love about fc is it's integration with color and soundtrack pro. I realize Adobe got rid of the poor soundbooth and replaced with audition. So I have hope on that. But more dedicated and complex color correction wasn't there. Color finesse in ae is clunky and doesn't seem to have the depth of color. I would be thrilled to find something like color without $1000 price tag. Any ideas on that?

I've been a Premiere user for about 15-16 years now. Most of my video editing is on Windows using PP-CS5, but I do occasionally have to do a little editing on the Mac side and I've always used FCE for that.

By virtue of my Premiere experience, whenever you kept saying something like "Premiere was like FCP..." it just struck me as backwards.

That is, the way you said it makes it sound like Adobe was copying FCP, but Premiere was out for years and years before the first version of FCP was ever released. So while there may be a feature or two that is an exception, where there's overlap, for the most part FCP would be following Adobe's example (or someone else's that also did it that way), not the other way around.

Really excellent, clear article. I work on Avid at work, but I need something for freelance projects -- and PP is now on the top of my list. FCP is a distant memory. And my guess is that Adobe (unlike Apple) will address some of PP's shortcomings and make it even better.

Quicktime X should have been at the top of your "the writing is on the wall" list.

It's designed to convert media from one of your apple products for use on your other apple products. It's useless in a professional environment and what's more annoying, is I can't set media to open by default in QT7 Pro (it just won't stick). So I have to either open QT7 first and file open or I have to right click (instead of a simple double click) and then search for QT7 in the utilities folder.

You can just replace Quicktime X with Quicktime Pro as the default, and add it to the dock. This is the first thing we do when we install the OS. Will test on Lion in the next few days...that could be a problem :)

Oh, one other comment I wanted to make, and I have not seen it mentioned (yet) in other forums of this nature: that's the fact that Adobe and Apple do not play well together. So the thing I would worry about is timely updates and support for mac-specific features and hardware from Adobe.

I can't remember any the issues clearly, as it's been years since I had to care, but for example, to this day you still can't automatically get hyperlinks into a PDF file when authoring in Word on a Mac, while it has never been a problem on a PC. In this case you have Adobe pointing fingers at Apple, and Apple pointing fingers at Microsoft and Microsoft pointing fingers at Adobe. An endless runaround.

In CS4, On Location was introduced (I think) but it was so buggy on a mac it was unusable. On a PC it worked like a charm, and I thought was very useful when doing Event shooting and whatnot. Have not tried since, but it was so bad on a Mac it would actually destroy video files. In all the CS 4 updates, the problem was never addressed.

It's things like this that make me leery of Adobe video apps, coupled with the facts that it took Adobe five (or more) incarnations of the video tools to make them stable. AME was a mess until CS5, on both a PC and a Mac. So beware...

Solution to that problem is to buy a PC. If you don't like windows, run Linux. You get better value for money on hardware. The only reason our company owns macs is because of FCP. We stop using FCP, we stop using Macs. Simple.

Probably the attitude Apple is counting on. They have very loyal users.

Personally we are in no rush to update - the bleeding edge isn't much fun. FCPX is only relevant to us in terms of a glimpse of the future. We'll stick with FCP7 until we absolutely have to upgrade and at that point assess all options objectively on merit.

[Jiggy Gaton]"It's things like this that make me leery of Adobe video apps, coupled with the facts that it took Adobe five (or more) incarnations of the video tools to make them stable. AME was a mess until CS5, on both a PC and a Mac. So beware.."

That certainly is one opinion I guess...

I've been on PPro/Adobe on Windows for a decade and it runs as well as any of my colleague's Mac/FCP systems with both apps having their embarrassing moments along the way...starting off with Premiere (not Pro) running with OSX Cheetah when it arrived...I'm not sure FCP would even run under OSX until Puma (I wasn't always Windows).

PPro CS1 and CS2 were quite solid on Windows...and did HD before FCP (and did RAW with the SI2K before RED was a prototype...and PPro is on its third release supporting RED R3D files directly). CS3 was starting to get resource intensive with the increasing raw format support, and CS4 underwent a MAJOR plumbing change with settings dropping from the project to the sequence...so third party vendors dealing with the settings had to re-jigger rather extensively.

AME has had only one issue prior to CS5 that I can recall and that was that I found I could get better H264 exports from QT Pro than through AME...but that does seem to be handled.

I haven't run a Mac as my major system for a number of years now, but keep in mind that QuickTime remained 32 bit 10 years after the OS went 64...Adobe's video apps typically ran far better when not using Apple's media wrapper, which has been in extreme need of updating for a very long time.

For CS5, Adobe had to write their own frame server application to get 32 bit QT to be able to work with 64 bit CS5. But of course, Apple still prefers it over Flash...

CS5 is quite advanced, very fast, and the Adobe suite's integration is very, very good on Windows. Because Adobe doesn't transcode or rewrap anything, I do find that those accustomed to 32 bit FCP7 sometimes have a system that simply doesn't perform as well with 64 bit CS5/5.5...it just needs more juice.

Nice review! thx. I came to FCS3 from PPro, during one of the earlier CS versions. I was having a heck of time back then with Premiere, as it was not very stable on a PC platform back in the day. Now, after a few years loving FCS3 on a mac, it's sad to think this run is over. But CS 5.5 is a very nice suite, so let's see... FCS3 still has about 6 months or so to go before it becomes obsolete on Lion, so FCPX has that amount of time to improve. If it doesn't, then ur right, PPro might be the answer. Cheers,
Jigs

As a relatively new editor with only about a year's experience, I've found the transition from Final Cut to Premiere to be much less difficult than I had anticipated.

Using the training resources available at Adobe and Lynda.com in conjunction with the help manual, I was able to use Premiere (instead of Final Cut) to complete a very short video scoring project for a summer class at the end of June.

My project took a bit longer to complete, but I was able to learn Premiere while working on a deadline.

Premiere's integration with After Effects and Audition is (mostly) a true joy. Although Dynamic Link still has a few problems, it is much improved under CS5.5.

The one FCP feature that I do really miss (and is unavailable in Premiere) is the ability to adjust the edit point directly (numerically or with keyboard shortcuts). Using the Trim Monitor is becoming less awkward with practice, but it sometimes it seems less than efficient.

Most university and art school film/video departments use Final Cut to teach students editing. It's a difficult time: everyone is contemplating a future that may not include colored markers.

Your review will really help others make an informed decision about the alternatives to FCP.

Thanks for the positive feedback, all! I'm glad you guys liked the piece, and I hope it helps ease any transition people choose to make in the weeks/months ahead. Thanks too for the tips about timelime importing and the tilde key! I will be incorporating both into my workflows.

One thing I forgot to mention, as well: Premiere also allows for importing of Final Cut Pro 7 projects in that you can save the project in Final Cut as XML, and then import that into Premiere. Basic effects and motion attributes carry over automatically. It' not quite as convenient as a true file import, but is definitely better than what Final Cut Pro X offers right now.

Thank you for the in-depth review. As a relatively new editor (having worked with FCP 7 for only the past year or so) I was looking to get myself a Mac for personal projects and get FCP 7 or X once the more experienced users weighed in. Having seen the backlash I have now opted to stick with a PC and Premiere Pro and seeing your review gives me even more confidence that for the level of work I'll be doing I will be completely happy with it.

I went through the same process of learning Premiere after nearly a decade of using FCP last year, and there's a lot to like about the program. It's definitely more familiar than FCPX at first glance.

One very nice shortcut is that Shift-Z (when mapped to FCP commands) will both show your full timeline and zoom back into your last zoom level on the timeline. Very handy when popping out to get reference and trying to find your way back in to finesse a cut.

Also, in case you haven't come across it yet, a word of caution on audio:

Syncing picture and separately recorded audio and exporting OMFs can be somewhat painful because PP requires you to do this in nested sequences (if you want to have access to them in your browser/project window). The audio data from nested sequences plays back fine and exports properly as a single file, but when trying to view a waveform in the viewer or export an OMF the audio data from a nested sequence does not transfer and you end up with a blank viewer or an empty OMF file.

I cut a 25 minute narrative on Premiere last year, and in the end I had to re-cut my audio files into the main sequence before sending to my sound editor.

And the ` key is definitely Adobe's best use of shortcuts to date. For those who don't know, it expands the active panel to full-screen.

That may have changed with 5.5 as you now use the 'merge' command to sync dual system audio and don't need to nest any sequences. It simply reates a new clip with all tracks of audio linked to the clip. I have then created a bin (by scene) for all of my merged clips

Thanks for the excellent synopsis. While I haven't made any decisions yet re FCP it's good to know migration to Premiere would be reasonable. Ironically, the first non-linear video editing I ever did was with Premiere back in the 90s. Talk about the great mandella.

Very well written and fair article. I will be sticking with FCP 6 and Motion for a while as it works for what I do which is very similar to what you do. Seems like if I do make the transition to PP in the future it shouldn't take that long to get up to speed. Thanks again.

Re: The mouse scrolling. This is something you should unlearn. The Tilde key is a far better solution, and you'll find that scrolling up and down becomes rare. This is one of the most brilliant things anyone at Adobe ever invented.

I will have to recuse myself on content (as an Adobe employee) but I wanted to compliment you on the article. Very fair, balanced and well written. I think that a lot of FCP who are looking at alternatives will find your articles very helpful.

Just a quick one in case you weren't aware. You can import timelines from other premiere projects if you so desire. Just double click in the project panel, choose your premiere project you wish to access your timeline from and a panel will pop up asking you if you wish to import the whole project or selected sequences. Voila!

It's always interesting to hear views from the other side of the fence, as it were, and elegance in timeline editing is one place that I feel PPro is lacking.

Maybe all this FCPX shake up will add up to more enhanced timeline editing features in future releases. Here's hoping.

Former skeptic John Davidson was right there with everyone else when FCPX was released who deemed it a complete disappointment for broadcast pros. Many updates and much experimentation later, he's now a believer: he has FCPX not only running on shared storage for broadcast work, but for John, it does so even better than FCP 7 ever did. Here he introduces a 5-part series, taking you step-by-step from project set-up to delivery, ready to help other broadcast pros get moving with FCPX.

With five edit suites currently running at Biscardi Creative Media, and four more on standby, Walter Biscardi and crew need the best possible performance our of their workflow and machines. Here, Walter describes the power (yes, power) of the iMac, the workhorse Adobe Premiere Pro, and some never say never insight on FCP X.

A group of editors gathered at a Hollywood Post Alliance Sales Resource Group luncheon to debate the merits of today's nonlinear editing systems. In the process, they argued less over tools and complained more about an ever-changing workflow. And, yes, there are a few fans of FCPX.

After coming across and commenting on a post in the forums concerning FCPX and its current popularity and possibility for serious editing use, Charlie Austin was contacted by Tim Wilson to expand his original thoughts for Bovine consumption. Care to chew the cud with us?

Herein lies the cautionary tale of a long-time user of Final Cut Pro, penned for those who would consider switching NLEs. Are there tools that will positively replace FCP 7? Are there NLEs that are even more powerful than our now evanescent favorite?

Dennis Kutchera went to Vegas with a goal - to be tantalized by the new colour-grading options - in essence, to cheat on his beloved Avid. What happens in Vegas, this time, comes back with some great stories.

Convenience is more important than quality -- I've taught a couple of generations of students that understanding this basic reality is a great way to predict just about any future media trend, and in the case of NAB, it looks like the equation has not lost a molecule of relevance.

This is no ordinary NAB recap. This isn't a collection of thoughts about products and software. This is the confession of a small-town starry-eyed NAB virgin, and the adventures and anxieties she finds herself in.